


What The Thunder Said

by spacemonkey



Category: U2
Genre: Angst, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-12-02 11:58:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11508957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacemonkey/pseuds/spacemonkey
Summary: Edge attempts to come to terms with his relationship with Bono during the recording of Achtung Baby.





	What The Thunder Said

**Author's Note:**

> HELLO ALL, THIS TURNED OUT WAY ANGSTIER THAN I PLANNED AND I'M SORRY. I will write happy stuff soon, I promise, but I was reading some poetry last night and felt compelled to write this. Title comes from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, it'll make sense, I promise. Erm...I hope you all enjoy? I love you all--and I just realized this is my 39th U2 fic. Wow. Um. Wow. I better come up with something GOOD for my 40th I suppose?!?!?!

Edge could remember being a placid child, and even if he hadn't his mother had always been there to remind him. Around the dinner table, over the phone, alone or surrounded by people—by strangers that she just had to charm, or those that knew him well enough to have heard such stories from her, well enough to have made their own assumptions about how he'd been early in life. “You don’t say,” Bono had said most recently, his voice as sweet as cherry pie as his gaze had slowly shifted until he had Edge’s undivided attention. They had shared a smile then, the sort that made Edge wonder. “Well, I’ll be.”

Later, hidden away from the world Bono had turned to him wearing a different smile. “Did you know,” he had said, “that you were so placid, the Edge?”

“Only as a child.”

“Really? You see yourself differently now?”

He did. In part. There were other factors to consider now, the sort that even the brightest of children could never begin to comprehend. “Perhaps.”

Bono had then whispered, “Show me,” and it was rare that he expected a _no_ from Edge. Rare for a reason. It was difficult to deny him of anything, easy to follow him—easy when there was little else on Earth that Edge would have preferred to do.

“I don’t buy it,” Bono had said, after. “Not completely. You had to have been a little bastard every now and then as a child. I know what you’re like.”

He did. And he was right. In part.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” Edge had started, and it was only in such a moment that he could admit such a thing. “I actually never shared well with others as a child.” He had watched Bono’s smile shift, slowly but surely, slipping away only when he had added, “Sometimes, I still don’t.” Only in the aftermath had it occurred to Edge to say such things, to let his words linger, until Bono could do nothing else but reach his own conclusions regarding Edge’s intent, or break the silence that followed.

“Edge. . .”

As brilliant as he was, Bono had managed to do both.

 

* * *

 

Edge liked to believe he knew each and every way that Bono could think to smile, though now and then even he was surprised. But it was new days that they were heading towards—how could a person not change when facing uncharted waters? Bono had every right to smile differently. It didn’t mean that he was drifting away.

He had once been foolish enough to imagine _that_ smile—the one that had appeared when he kissed Bono’s mouth, when his lips had found the hollow of Bono’s throat, that had followed Edge down as he’d fallen to his knees—being reserved only for him.  Such fanciful thoughts were bound to occur early on, but Edge was smarter now. He could once again see the world for how it really was. Still, a part of him would always feel strongly—it wasn’t hate, it could never even be close to hate with her—about sharing that smile with another person. Sometimes he did hate himself though, in that special fleeting way that everyone hated themselves once in a while, for ever feeling jealous of such a thing. Of her. And when Ali pulled him in for a hug, asking _how are you, really?_ and looked at him in that way that she had as she reminded him _you know I can see through any lie you can come up with so don’t even try it_ —and it was true, she had always managed to look straight on through his surface and locate his true hurt, the things he always valiantly tried to hide—the guilt that Edge felt lingered long after she walked away.

 _What are we doing?_ he put forth to his reflection on those days where that guilt came close to eating him alive.

 _What are we doing?_ he wrote in letters that he never could bring himself to post.

“What are we doing?” he asked Bono only when there was no way of avoiding the question a moment longer.

“Shh,” came the response. “Do you hear it? Thunder.” It wasn’t the answer, but when Bono turned to him and smiled, Edge took it as one nonetheless. He could make himself believe, for now, that it was enough. It seemed that he could even make himself believe, for as long as they both needed that night, that _he_ was enough. “Just listen to that thunder, Edge,” Bono said, only a breath away from begging. “There’s a big storm coming, can you feel it?”

 

* * *

 

For three weeks Edge barely saw sunlight. It was always dark when he arrived at the studio, and it was a different sort of dark whenever he left it, comprising of those deep greys that came just before dawn broke through. It was the tail end of the night that he’d sometimes thought of, when he was at his loneliest, as the desperate hours—the time when he was well past ignoring his problems, when he could do nothing else but give into his latent desires, and finally collapse against damp sheets, breathless and hurting, to toss and turn until something had to give, whether it came in the form of a prayer or something much sadder; something that had often felt a lot like despair.

He barely slept for those three weeks. He had barely slept for what felt like a year. Berlin was grey to him, but when he played his guitar Edge managed to produce some colour. And it wasn’t like he was trying to distance himself from Bono, but life had a way of getting out of hand. Outside of the studio he read books of poetry—to inspire himself artistically, he told himself again and again. He read T.S. Eliot and saw himself looking ahead up a white road, thought of the night of that storm. He broke a guitar string in the studio when Bono was in the room, and had to remind himself it was just a thing that happened now and then. He read Eliot again, and barely slept, applauding himself all the while for not letting Bono get inside his head—they could make it through, make it right, they could—until he allowed himself to become desperate.

At the studio he followed Bono into the bathroom. When he locked the door the air immediately seemed to change, and when he crowded Bono against the wall Edge could barely keep his composure. And it was strange how his mind fragmented when they kissed, how he thought of Bowie when it occurred to him that they were kissing by a wall in Berlin, and then came the chorus looping between his ears, telling him how they could be heroes as Edge imagined what he might want to do to Bono that night, imagined all the things they shouldn’t do. And in between such pretty little mental images, in between the breath in his ear and the body melting into him, growing hard against him, moaning because of him, Edge was hit with the distant memory of the two of them tucked away in Bono’s tiny bedroom listening to _Low_ for the very first time. He could still see Bono’s face. He could still remember walking back and forth in that broom-closet of a bedroom when Bono had been elsewhere. Wall to wall he’d gone. Back and forth in strides that were perfectly average. It had been five steps from wall to wall in that bedroom. Five steps. Just the thought of it brought back all the pity he’d felt for Bono back then, but if Edge pushed that aside, even for a moment, he could focus on the important things. He could still see Bono’s face that day, as they listened to the record. His expression had left Edge wanting to kiss him. He hadn’t. Not then. He hadn’t. He should have. Maybe then he might have. . .

He held Bono steady against the wall of the studio bathroom and took him to pieces, pulled him closer as he fell apart, and as they kissed again, slow at first before turning desperate once more, Edge allowed himself to breathe in the moment even as he told himself this was the last time. Again. It was the last time again. It was. Something had to give soon. Because if it didn’t, he knew that when the storm came—and it would, it _would_ —they might just be in too far deep to step back, to follow, to learn and start anew, and listen to what the thunder said.

 


End file.
